One of Ferrari's biggest on-track successes of 2025 is its rookie Formula 3 champion - the most convincing in the third-tier series since current Formula 1 leader Oscar Piastri's title five years ago.
Rafael Camara has taken F3 by storm this season, earning five pole positions in nine rounds - two more than any F3 champion since it was renamed in 2019 and impressive given the round-by-round performance swings in the championship.
Even the likes of F1 graduates Piastri and Gabriel Bortoleto couldn't stamp their mark like that over one lap, instead relying on supreme racecraft and consistency.
Trident driver Camara has displayed both, winning three of the opening five rounds from pole position and adding a fourth feature race win in tricky, rain-affected conditions at the Hungaroring on Sunday.
That was enough for the 20-year-old to seal the title with a round to spare, the earliest it's been clinched in this F3 era.
'Now I can relax a bit'
Camara has been convincingly the best driver in F3 this year, but this hasn't meant it's been a comfortable ride.
Those opening back-to-back feature race victories put an early target on the Brazilian's back as the clear championship favourite and a slight mid-season results slump did threaten his title bid.
The pace never deserted him, but a loose wheel in Monaco and another no-score in the Silverstone feature race because of the wrong tyre choice in the wet threatened to be the start of a wobble.
But turning up to a potentially title-clinching Hungaroring round and turning around a "very tough" weekend into pole position and a feature race win, despite race-long pressure in the wet, is testament to Camara's resilience.
"Now I can relax a bit, it was a very long season," Camara said after winning the title.
"We did nine races already, so basically all of the championship, very tough for the head.
"It's not a job from yesterday [SAturday], it's basically the whole life you're sacrificing for these moments."
How good is he?
Only time will tell, but this doesn't feel like a vintage F3 field in terms of strength in depth. But some interesting prospects didn't necessarily have the right machinery to make a sustained impact this year.
Camara's closest competition has come from Red Bull junior Nikola Tsolov, who is in his third year of F3.
Tsolov is only 18 and jumped to F3 with only a single year of car racing before that, so while he does have superior F3 experience, he graduated to car racing at the same time as F3 rookie Camara.
Plus, there was a brand-new F3 car this year, so that experience factor isn't quite as big as previous years.
Tsolov impressed in the title-deciding wet Hungaroring race too, charging from 21st to sixth, and he won the Monaco feature race from pole earlier in the season.
Tsolov lost a feature race win in Austria to a plank wear disqualification and his team also got the tyre choice wrong in the Silverstone feature. The points gap to Camara is probably bigger than the performance gap between the two this year.
Tsolov's Campos Racing team-mate, new Aston Martin F1 junior Mari Boya, is also in his third year and does have two more years of car racing experience.
Boya's scored more points than any other driver in the last four rounds, but his start to the season was too troublesome for him to ever be in serious title contention.
His second place to Camara in Hungary does move him above Tsolov and makes him one of the more exciting drivers likely to debut in Formula 2 at the end of this year.
Among the top prospects is another Ferrari junior, 18-year-old Tuukka Taponen from Finland, but he hasn't been able to show his full potential at ART Grand Prix beyond a trio of podiums.
McLaren junior Ugo Ugochukwu is a far better prospect than his 16th place in the championship makes him look.
Ugochukwu, the tallest driver on the F3 grid, was held back by both Prema's slow start to adapting to the brand-new car and being above the minimum weight limit.
But two things changed before the Austrian Grand Prix round in June. Prema stripped the Papaya paint from his car and crucially, F3 raised the minimum weight limit by 3kg.
Those two things put Ugochukwu on a level-playing field, and it helpfully coincided with Prema making a breakthrough too.
Suddenly, his average gap to pole switched from 0.827s to 0.204s, and there were back-to-back podiums across Spa and Hungary.
Alex Dunne finishing 14th in Formula 3 last year before winning two of the first three Formula 2 races this year as a rookie is a timely reminder that a lowly position in F3 isn't the end of the road for an F1 prospect.
It's all about how much faith a driver's backers have to see beyond the results on paper.
There were plenty of flashes to suggest Mercedes can keep faith in Noah Stromsted (sixth in the standings), so too McLaren's leading junior in the standings, second-year driver Martinius Stenshorne (fifth) - Kimi Antonelli's closest rival in his 2023 Formula Regional Championship title-winning year.
The Antonelli comparison
Camara spent his first two years in car racing as Antonelli's Prema team-mate, seeing Antonelli blow everyone else away in Italian and German Formula 4 (Antonelli won 22 races while Camara won three).
They both graduated to Formula Regional, where Antonelli took the title (although with slightly less dominance) while Camara was fifth.
From there, Antonelli skipped straight to F2 for 2024, and F1 one year later, while Camara has taken a slower but highly successful path, winning Formula Regional in 2024 and, now, this highly convincing F3 title campaign.
He may have started out in the shadow of Antonelli, but Camara has now done more than enough to warrant his own place in the spotlight.
Ollie Bearman is the most obvious next in line for a Ferrari F1 seat, likely whenever Lewis Hamilton's tenure ends, but Camara has placed himself as next-in-queue as Ferrari's best prospect outside of F1.
Plus, Ferrari has one of the strongest records of getting juniors into F1 seats elsewhere with four drivers (Bearman, Mick Schumacher, Antonio Giovinazzi and Charles Leclerc) all being placed in customer teams in the last seven years.
A move to F2 for 2026 is all but certain, and it wouldn't be surprising to see Camara make an early debut with four rounds of the current season still remaining - late-season F2 driver changes are commonplace.
There is still one more Formula 3 round for him to complete, at Monza in early September, but his attention will quickly switch to F2.
He'll arrive there as the first driver since Piastri to win Formula Regional (or the equivalent Eurocup, in Piastri's case) and F3 in successive years.
That Piastri trajectory certainly isn't a bad one to follow.
